Tuesday, 14 February 2017

Ride straight. Or: the importance of the great teachers.

Today I did something I was afraid of. I
jumped a course of jumps.

Last year I signed up for a charity challenge to do a
one-day-event. I haven’t done dressage or cross-country or show-jumping since I
was fifteen and I’m now fifty. Since getting my red mare I went back to scratch
and educated myself in an entire new school of horsemanship, which I’m just
getting the hang of. She herself was bred for the flat, went for polo after
racing, and has never competed in a show in her life.

Of course we would sign up. It’s for charity.

The jumping scares me witless. It scares me
because I’m afraid of having a crash and wounding myself and not being able to
look after the animals and it scares me because I’m afraid that I will make a
fool of myself in front of people. You’d think I’d be used to making a fool of
myself but apparently I’m not. Or there are some fools that are more equal than
others. Or something.

Despite all this, today the mare and I rode
three miles down the valley and jumped a course, in front of many people and
with many, many opportunities for folly. And I did not fall off and we did not
have a crash and I was so enchanted with the brilliance of the red mare that I
did not care what anyone thought.

It was very wonderful and I did a lot of
whooping and felt quite proud because I had faced my fears, but the big life
lesson is that I did not do it on my own. I had a teacher. I accepted help. I
am very, very bad at accepting help. I have some bizarre need to do everything
on my own. I don’t want to be that demanding, needy, hopeless person who haunts my imagination like a cautionary tale.

One day, I shall get it into my thick head
that everyone can’t do everything by themselves. No man is an island, and no
woman either.

There are lots of interesting and clever
tactics to boost one’s own confidence and many psychological aspects to ponder
and many books to read. Such things should be pondered. If one can make a thing
better, so one should. But nothing, nothing,
builds confidence like someone who has faith in you. And I mean proper faith.
Not mimsy, molly-coddling, oh you sweet thing of course you can do it kind of bollocks. That’s no good. The
gentle hand on the shoulder, the sympathetic look in the eye, the consoling
note in the voice that teeters on the abyss of the patronising – no, no, none
of that is what you need. What is required, what makes all the difference, is
someone who stands on the ground and shouts: ‘Ride straight.’ Because that person knows you can ride straight,
and wants you to ride straight, and has the belief that you can ride straight,
and then, suddenly, like a flapping great miracle straight from flappy old
heaven, with celestial choirs singing their heads off and everyone playing their harps, you ride straight. Yes, you damn well do.

I don’t really know how it works. Some people
simply are great teachers. I had one, years ago, who made me feel I could do
anything. He was called Mr Woodhouse and I can see him now, with his quizzical
look and that faintly fanatical gleam in his eye. All the other teachers
thought I worked hard but missed the top grade. (Eager, but a little bit second-rate, intellectually.) Mr Woodhouse thought I could go
all the way. And when I walked through the great arch into Canterbury Quad for
the first time, it was completely because of him.

University wasn’t a thing in my family. My
brothers and sister did not go. My mother did not go. My dad went for about
five minutes, found it all ‘far too difficult’ and gave up academic work and ran
the drag and went for sherry once a week with Hugh Trevor-Roper (‘have you
heard of him, darling?’) until it was decided with great goodwill and enormous
mutual relief that he should go down. I had one eccentric Irish godmother who
insisted I should go to Oxford but everything thought that a tremendous joke
until Mr Woodhouse, who was a very serious man indeed, coached me through the
exam and got me there.

Some teachers just have that gift, that
special extra something, the thing that does not quite go neatly into words.
They look like everyone else and they sound like everyone else and they don’t
seem to do anything extraordinary, but it’s all Dead Poets’ Society with them.
It’s Captain my bloody Captain and standing on the desks and thinking perhaps one
can be remarkable after all.

And that is why I did the thing I was afraid
of today, not because I was brave, or I was clever, or I was bold, but because
there was one of those talented ones, on the ground, shouting ‘Ride straight.’

They were tiny little fences. This charity
thing is entirely obscure and will be over in the blink of an eye and people
will hardly know it even happened. But it’s huge to me. It’s quite weird when
both your parents die. It’s so normal and natural and expected. It’s what
happens to everyone. You are fifty years old and you know how life works; you
know about funerals and grief and letting go of the Dear Departeds. Inside,
however, there is a voice that is wailing: I’m an orphan, I’m on my own, I don’t
know what happens next. No wonder I ran headlong into a challenge. It was some kind of existential howl of mere presence: look at me, I am not nothing, I can do stuff.

I feel as if I have to reinvent my life now
out of whole cloth. Everyone has gone. The dear Stepftather has gone to the
south and the nieces have gone to the south and my sister and brother-in-law
have gone to the south. There was a family enclave and now there is me and the
lurchers and the two mares. I don’t know that I leaned on that family but it
was there and it felt like something. My mother was a quarter of a mile away
and I saw her every morning. I made her breakfast and I made her laugh. And now
that’s all gone and all changed and there are great open spaces where people
once were.

So I have to learn to ride straight. I have to make new paths in those
open spaces, carve new tracks in the trackless wastes. I need confidence for
that, and hope, and a voice in my head that says you can do this, just like I had today, over those absurdly small
jumps that frighten me so much.

5 comments:

The doing it in front of people scares me the most. I go completely to pieces unless it is so tricky I get lost in it. I'm in awe.

And I feel I'm in much the same position with needing to carve out a new life, so I shall take "ride straight" as my motto. I wanted to create my own compound but it didn't work out, and now other things seem to be falling apart too, but I take heart from you and the life you've made. Thank you x

One of my biggest fears was falling. I walked a rigid line until I fell. And fell again. Then I fell, and flew down a flight of stairs, slid across the lobby of the Museum of Natural Science, on my butt, and came to a stop right in front of the ticket taker's feet.

I'd gone to see Lucy, our ancient ancestor. Nothing broke but my fear of falling. A sea of people parted around me, but no one offered to help me, aside from my mister. One Japanese tourist asked, "Did you fall?" I said yes, and that was the end of our conversation. People veered from their path to look down at me, but they never missed a step.

So. I have always survived what I feared most. You're braver than you know.

Something a friend keeps saying to me - any idiot can do the big stuff. The brave ones are the ones who're scared to hell, stare the damn thing in the whites of it's eyes, & do it anyway. I believe in you & I believe in the red mare, & most of all I believe in the partnership you've built together. You'll do grand.

Something a friend keeps saying to me - any idiot can do the big stuff. The brave ones are the ones who're scared to hell, stare the damn thing in the whites of it's eyes, & do it anyway. I believe in you & I believe in the red mare, & most of all I believe in the partnership you've built together. You'll do grand.

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